A lot has been said on the topic of accountability for the Miami Dolphins’ current predicament.

A situation so awful, so full of bad acts and bad decisions as this one leaves us wanting to place blame. Usually in a case like this – especially in sports - blame goes to the head guy.

In baseball, it is always the Manager of a baseball team that gets the axe when his team fails to satisfy. In basketball, it’s the Coach. In football, it’s almost always the Head Coach.

And that is where one faction on this board would like to lay the blame for the entire mess – all of it.

Yet another faction advocates lenience with our Head Coach, Cam Cameron, citing the decided lack of adequate talent on the team he was given to coach.

What is difficult for us to separate is the responsibility for the different factors that went into creating this mess, but unless we want to go on simply ranting to make ourselves feel better, we absolutely must.

There are many issues with the team as it stands today; many reasons why it is as bad as it is. but if we look at those reasons closely, they fall mainly into one global, overall factor, and two catch-all "umbrellas" on a middle-management level.

The global reason is Huizenga’s refusal to structure the Dolphins' football operation like any corporation has its different main areas of responsibility - in a manner to provide accountability.

I said from the resignation of Wannstedt that Huizenga should:

1. Establish the Dolphins’ management structure as two departments, Operations (the football side) and Finance; hire a President or simply promote Weidmeyer to the position, and hire VP's for each department. Those departments would report to him, but the VP's would be fully empowered to make decisions as regard their departments autonomously.
2. Make Mueller (or another present GM) the VP of football ops; have the Head Coach report to him, be responsible to him and be hireable/fireable by him.
3. Let Mueller/the VP conduct the search for a new Head Coach and hire the candidate he deems appropriate.
4. Have the Head Coach be responsible for the team and its management structure and staff, but have all pro personnel and draft decisions remain under Mueller's purview.
5. If the Head Coach fails, it's Mueller's responsibility to right the ship, fire the coach and hire a new one.

Instead, what you have now is a system where no one really knows where the responsibility of the one ends and the other's begins. There’s too much gray area.

Each side gets to point the finger at the other in a given situation because they share responsibility. it makes for a lack of accountability. There are visible areas of responsibility in terms of traditional roles, but the lines at the edges where the two meet are blurred.

that's the global factor; Huizenga’s failure as a businessman to see that the team, when all is said and done, is a business and should be structured as one - with built-in accountability at each level, but each level accountable to one person.

Then we look at the micro-factors that have gone into making this season the nightmare that it is: past personnel decisions - up to and including the 2007 draft - and the team personnel and staff, their management and the game day management.

Mueller and Cameron.

This where the board in general has had a problem distinguishing among the reasons for each issue.

One train of thought that couldn't be more mistaken is to blame everything - lock, stock and barrel - on personnel decisions.

Yes, we have awful players, yes, decisions made in the draft going back to 1997 have hampered us along the way from there to here, and the continuation of bad calls has compounded into the horror that is today's roster. It makes the Dolphins a bad, bad team.

But there is a point at which being a bad team ceases to be an excuse for how the players, bad as they might be, play.

In other words: bad teams are nothing new to the NFL.

There have always been Bill Bidwill's; Georgia Frontiere's; Al Davis's. Bad team owners who have, for one reason or another - usually either stubborn penuriousness or simply being egomaniacal asshats - doomed their respective teams to year after year, sometimes decades of failure on the field.

Then there are teams which have simply fallen on hard times, usually through poor decision-making on the personnel side of the operation, whatever factors drove that scenario for each of them.

The current manifestation of our Dolphins could be said to fall into this latter category.

However, no matter how bad bad teams have ever been, only one team in NFL history has managed to fail to win a single game in an entire season - the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Add together all the seasons played post-merger; add the number of teams which played each season; the number in that data group is over 1,000. Only one team during that span, in over one thousand seasons, managed the ultimate level of futility.

Given all of the bad teams - truly awful teams - which have played during that time, only one didn't win a game in an entire season. what that means, is that there is more to that "accomplishment" than simply being a bad team, a team lacking in talent.

One in one thousand. That’s very special.

It requires that a team not only be inherently awful, but that it also lack the ability to even just put itself in luck's way - to allow itself to benefit from the slightest stroke of good fortune that has horrible teams winning games they have no business winning.

It requires that key individual players quit on their teammates; that they quit and that other players see it, and quit as well, and that the quitting creates an atmosphere of discontent, and that the discontent divides the locker room and ultimately, that it all creates a culture of losing.

Those players must be held accountable. They must understand that they need to execute their assignments regardless of how they feel about the quarterback under center, or the defensive coordinator, or even the head coach.

They must play their best always, not only because they are professionals, but because the culture of "team" demands it of them - something they have learned through years of playing the game or any team sport since childhood.

Unless they're spoiled little *****es.

But who is responsible for the behavior of his players? Who is accountable for the team's culture once it is assembled, once it is the team with which the club has decided to go into the season? is it the gm? the president? the owner?

We know the answer: the Head Coach.

It is the Head Coach who decides which players start, which play, which sit. He alone is "where the buck stops" in every phase of his team after the gm hands him the keys to the car he's built - the car that presumably, they've built together.

That is why I hold Cameron responsible for the product he has put on the field this season.

I hold him accountable for not playing his young skill players sooner than he did, despite throwing his rookie center into the fire from day one, thereby demonstrating that he had no compunction about playing rookies.

I hold him accountable for his arrogance in not appointing even a de-facto Offensive Coordinator and trying to call plays himself, and how that has hurt the team - not to mention the development of his young skill players and his rookie quarterback.

I hold him accountable for permitting the defensive coordinator in his charge to go away from a system which had essentially the same unit one of the top-rated defense last year; to play his best player and his one big-dollar free agent acquisition out of the positions in which they enjoyed their greatest success.

But most of all, I hold him accountable for not holding his players accountable. For seeing what we all saw in the last couple of weeks: his players quitting on the team, and not having the stones to do something about it.

For not punishing his entire offensive line for their shameful refusal to block at all for young Mr. Beck, then blocking just fine from the moment that lemon replaced Beck, I hold him accountable.

For not benching Jason Taylor for dogging it the way he has since day one of this season, I hold him accountable.

But most of all, for allowing the culture on his team to get worse than anything we saw in the Wannstedt era, I hold him accountable.

And for all of that, not for the dearth of talent, nor the failures of coaches and GM's before him, I hold him accountable.

Wayne Huizenga should hold him no less accountable.

 

are you part of our fort lewis stryker brigade?

 

from an article posted earlier by ffic (thanks john!)

http://www.profootballweekly.com/PFW/NFL/AFC/AFC+East/Miami/WWHI/2007/wwhi121407.htm

for those who say that there would be no difference if cam went winless or won just one game. the significance of going winless cannot be discounted, no matter how much you want to call names about it.